Overview & identity
Overview and identity gives you the one-paragraph version — what they do, when they started, who owns it and how big it is — so you can decide in seconds whether it even fits the thesis.
VC deal sourcing and screening on one page. A dossier gives you private company research, light diligence and competitor analysis — fast enough to triage a pipeline, sourced enough to trust.
The hard part of early-stage investing isn't the deep diligence — it's everything before it. You see far more companies than you can fund, and most of the work is triage: figuring out, quickly, whether a private company is worth a real conversation. Private company research is genuinely hard because the data is scattered and the company has no obligation to publish it. So screening either eats a morning per name, or it doesn't happen and you fly on the deck alone.
A dossier is the screening layer. Point it at a private company and you get a sourced snapshot: what they do, who's behind it, the funding history and investors on the cap table as far as the public record shows, the hiring radar as a growth proxy, the tech they're building on, and the relationship web of customers, partners and rivals. It's the VC deal sourcing research you'd assign to an analyst — without the wait.
Five sections do the screening work. Read them in order and you have a first opinion in minutes.
Overview and identity gives you the one-paragraph version — what they do, when they started, who owns it and how big it is — so you can decide in seconds whether it even fits the thesis.
The money trail is the heart of the screen: funding rounds, investors, filings and revenue signals. It tells you the stage, who is already in, and whether the round in front of you makes sense.
For a private company with no public revenue, the hiring radar is the best growth proxy you have. Accelerating headcount in product and sales is traction you can read without an NDA.
The relationship web maps customers, partners and competitors — instant competitor analysis and the start of your market map. You read a company by the company it keeps.
Risk flags surface litigation, layoffs and reputation notes early, so a problem shows up at the screening stage instead of two weeks into diligence.
A screening pass you can run on every name that crosses your desk.
Run a dossier the moment a deck or a referral lands. The brief is ready before you finish reading the email.
Check stage, prior investors and revenue signals against your thesis. Most names get a fast, well-reasoned pass right here.
Use the relationship web to place the company among its rivals and partners — and to find the next three companies to source.
Promote the survivors into real diligence with the public picture already written up as your first memo section.
For market mapping, run a file on each player in a category and the relationship webs start to overlap — you can see the leaders, the up-and-comers and the white space without buying a research report. For sourcing, every competitor and partner a dossier surfaces is a new name to investigate. And when you do reach real diligence, the dossier becomes your fact-check baseline against what the founder told you.
No — it is the layer before it. A dossier is fast, public, light diligence: enough to screen, prioritise and write a first memo. Real diligence (data room, references, legal, financials) still happens; this just makes sure you only do it on the names worth it.
It pulls funding rounds, investors and filings from the public record, which is strong for anything that has been announced or filed and naturally thinner for unannounced rounds. Everything is sourced, so you can see exactly what is confirmed versus inferred.
Yes. The relationship web plus a file per competitor is effectively a build-it-yourself market map — leaders, challengers and adjacencies, drawn from public signals and sourced line by line.
one file per name. a first opinion in minutes.